The journey from a reactive call centre model to a proactive, Customer Experience (CX) Hub is one of the most critical transformations facing businesses today, as they look to respond to the significant evolution in customer service. Customer support, once a transactional, back-office function for businesses and a grudge engagement for customers, is now at the forefront of driving retention, loyalty and growth. The demands of the modern customer mean that traditional approaches to service – including reliance on standard call centres – are no longer sufficient.
Customers now expect to get service on their terms, and not the brand’s, that the service should be personalised, not be restricted to standard operating hours, and much more. Then, there is also a significant move away from phone calls and emails, which can be seen by the rapid local adoption of instant messaging. As an example, local bus company Intercape saw a 200% year-on-year growth in the use of WhatsApp for Business and web chat, while traditional phone call volumes declined (Read the Intercape case study here). This highlights that businesses must evolve quickly to meet customers where they are present.
The transition to a CX Hub transforms an organisation’s customer support department into a dynamic, intelligent centre capable of ensuring that customers receive choice, convenience, and a consistent experience across all touchpoints. If businesses cannot deliver this enhanced experience, they risk losing customers to a competitor who can.
Integration is key to mastering omnichannel
For organisations looking to deliver improved CX, they must move beyond the traditional call centre and toward implementing multi- or omnichannel solutions. While many businesses are adding new channels, research shows that customers often feel that organisations still do not get customer service right, suggesting that merely adding channels and having the tools in place is not enough. The reality is that success depends not on the tool, but on how it is used.
Without proper integration, businesses are still operating in silos, which leads to inconsistent service. For example, customers are often forced to repeat themselves as they are moved from one channel or agent to another, resulting in an unintended but degraded experience. When integration is done right, however, the customer immediately experiences reduced friction and enjoys a consistent, seamless CX every time they interact with the brand.
Proper integration also has significant internal advantages:
- Empowered agents: Customer service agents are provided with context and a full history of the customer’s past interactions, enabling them to have personalised, better quality conversations. For contact centres with high interaction volumes, Telviva Omni acts as the “single pane of glass”, presenting relevant CRM data to agents for personalisation and automatically updating customer records.
- Better data and analytics: Integration gets rid of internal silos, enabling businesses to gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey. This provides a treasure trove of insights for improvement, helping to reveal trends, identify training opportunities, and highlight gaps in systems.
- Improved compliance: Having a single, integrated platform ensures all engagements happen on official communication channels where they can be tracked and recorded, strengthening compliance and reducing risk.
Integration further brings capabilities like regulatory-compliant cloud-based call recording. Moreover, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) services for transcription eliminate manual note-taking and can summarise action items to be added directly into the CRM.
Telviva’s business communications tools, built on Open Standards and APIs, seamlessly integrate with popular CRM systems to bring context to conversations. Telviva also offers its Software Development Kit (SDK) to organisations with bespoke or legacy CRM systems, allowing developers to embed communication components, such as calling, call control, and contact centre features, directly into their systems.
Learn how integration enables brands to enhance CX by having more personalised conversations, in this discussion between Kelvin Brown and Martie de Beer.
Finding the right channel for the job
While supporting multiple channels is crucial, a comprehensive CX strategy goes further by embracing an ‘opti-channel’ approach, also known as ‘right-channelling’, where the organisation determines the optimal channel for a specific type of engagement. Transactional engagements – such as subscribing to a service, submitting a form, or requesting an invoice – are best suited to simple, digital channels and are easily automated.
Defining the most appropriate channel for each transaction, from both the business and the customer perspective, helps eliminate compliance challenges and streamlines workflows. It is crucial however, that even as customers are guided to the ‘right channel’, their experience must remain consistent.
In addition all communications must still be integrated into a single plane of glass, ensuring the service agent has access to all relevant information and providing customers with the ability to move seamlessly across channels.
AI, automation, and human-machine collaboration
Automation in business communications is fast emerging as the next frontier in customer interaction, and is no longer merely an option, but a strategic imperative that transforms customer interaction and operational efficiency. One of the primary reasons for transitioning to a CX Hub is to enable a business to provide personalised service to its customers at scale, and automation is key to achieving this.
Automation alleviates pressure on customer service agents, freeing them from mundane and repetitive tasks and allowing them to focus on complex queries that require human intervention. High-volume, low-complexity interactions like FAQs and knowledge bases are ideal candidates for automation and are frequently integrated into web chat and WhatsApp interfaces, reducing the burden on agents while meeting growing customer expectations for instant responses to their queries.
Intercape’s implementation of automated common queries resulted in their automated FAQ conversations soaring from around 30,000 per month to over 190,000 per month in just three months.
The ideal approach is “digital when you want it, human when you need it” – while the technology handles mundane tasks and ensures agents have all the information they need at their fingertips, the agent is there to provide complex support or intervene when a digital journey goes wrong. As such, the ability exists within Telviva’s technology to escalate from a digital assistant to a human agent, using text, audio or video – the true power of omnichannel.
Customer Journey Mapping for improved CX
While the benefits of automation and integration are immense, implementing solutions without a clear strategy can lead to new problems, such as over-automating. To avoid these pitfalls, a structured approach is essential, beginning with a Customer Journey Mapping exercise, which is crucial to understanding the various systems, processes, and people within the business that shape the customer experience.
The process involves critical steps, including defining the objective, gathering relevant information (people, processes, technologies), identifying customer touch points, setting phases and stages, validation, and continuous evaluation. Ultimately, the customer journey map must be maintained as a living document to ensure it remains relevant and aligned with business objectives. Telviva’s contact centre team specialises in interrogating a business’s processes and customer touch points to deliver this essential journey mapping process. (Read the blog for more on how to enhance CX by developing a customer journey map in 8 steps).
The outcome of this process is a single, cohesive view of the digital journey across all touchpoints, ensuring that any automation implemented is aligned with the overall CX strategy and does not introduce additional bottlenecks. Without this information, organisations struggle to understand what their customers are experiencing, including their preferences, pain points, or expectations.
Taking the first steps
Once this holistic view is in place, the key is to make a start. Organisations should ask: “What is our current state, and what is the first, logical step we can take on our automation journey?”. Identify one specific area and focus on getting that implementation right, perhaps by starting with a pilot programme to measure, analyse, and refine, before expanding further.
Where do you begin your automation journey? Our CEO, David Meintjes, has some advice in this video.
The evolution from a reactive call centre to a strategic CX Hub is not a technology upgrade but a strategic imperative that helps businesses improve operational efficiency and enhance customer interactions and experiences. By embracing managed services and the “digital when you want it, human when you need it” approach, organisations can transform their customer service departments into dynamic, proactive CX Hubs that build lasting relationships.
Whether your business requires a basic solution or a full-function omnichannel operation, Telviva’s Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solution, supported by our highly experienced professional service team and local development teams, provides comprehensive platforms and customisation to streamline your operations and optimise your digital journey. Contact us today.
By Martie de Beer, CCaaS Executive at Telviva.